Every year my dad makes two trips down to his favorite lake to fish, once in the spring and once in the fall. The trips are planned very specifically around the best times to fish the lake. When the waters are still cooler and when the moon phases are just right. And this week couldn’t have been planned better. When we travel down there we always stay at Hideaway Resort, the owners are very nice and keep the ground looking great and it has a percect location on the lake.

In the mornings it was around 35 degrees and usually had a thick fog. We had to bundle up in winter gear like coats, gloves and hats just to move across the water. Then by the afternoons we would have shed all of our layers by the time it reached 65-70. We would usually get out just as the sun was coming up and fish for a few hours before heading back to the cabin for breakfast, then we would head out with our wives for the afternoon and fish some more during the warmer part of the day and either fish until dinner time or drop off the girls and head back for the last hour or two on the lake.

Every morning we would start off on some main lake points or secondary points and fish in about 10-12ft of water. Some strikes came on top water buzzbait lures and crankbaits but caught the majority of the fish on texas rigged plastics.

As we came back out in the middle of the day we moved locations so that we were fishing deeper points (about 15-20 feet deep) and rock ledges near the channel and deeper water. We did catch a few fish at most of the spots we chose to go to and were looking for main lake points, rock ledges, trees or sunken structure that were close to the main channel. So this narrowed down our search and allowed us to find the fish pretty quickly.

We did find one spot that we continued to go back to every few hours that turned out to be our best fishing on the lake. It was a very small cove that had a flat ledge about 15-20 feet deep right off of the main channel that was 80-100 feet deep. And in this small cove there were fallen trees that provided bank structure and the cove bottom had tree piles on the ledge 15ft down. We would work our way along the rock ledge and as soon as we would hit this cove we would catch 6-8 nice bass. There were Spotted, Smallmouth and even a few Largemouth that were hanging out there, and if you have ever fished table rock you know their smallmouth and spotted are some of the most fun fish to catch. But once we would catch a hand full of them the bite would slow down so we would head to another spot and give it a rest for an hour or two before heading back to the same cove and catching more. It was a lot of fun and we couldn’t seem to find another spot that held the fish as well as this one did.

We fished most of the weekend with Texas Rigged Plastics. The second best lure we were catching fish on was a deep diving Rapala Crankbait that matched the color of the shad. And then a few stragglers were caught on a pumpkin colored pig-n-jig.

My Dad did beat me this weekend with the number of fish caught but together we totaled around 40 bass in a little over 2 days on the lake. And most of them were keepers between 1-2lbs with my dad catching a few Smallmouths at about 2.5 pounds. What a fun week and can’t wait to get back down there.

Enjoy the pictures.

Overall Ranking: 5 Star

Just everything about this lake is great. Good size and structure, fishing is awesome and you can’t beat the view.